


to resist the coming storm

by daekie



Category: Guild Wars 2 (Video Game)
Genre: Attempted Murder, Canon-Typical Violence, Extended Scene, Gen, Living World Episode: s05e03 No Quarter, Minor Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-05
Updated: 2020-11-05
Packaged: 2021-03-09 02:15:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,885
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27397057
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/daekie/pseuds/daekie
Summary: “Look around!  You’re killing your own.  You don’t want this, I know you don’t!”Della Fearflight has killed three Elder Dragons, raised a fourth, and has resigned herself to killing two more.  But there’s - a difference, between fighting wars you didn’t make and fighting the people you grew up with.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 12





	to resist the coming storm

The first time Della Fearflight, leader of Dragon’s Watch and Magister of the Durmand Priory, fights her way through Drizzlewood Coast -- well, she’s seen a terrible lot, in her life. If nothing else, the sheer _variety_ of her experiences is likely beyond that of most other Charr; every battle she keeps the Caladbolg Solana at her side to remember Trahearne, and for the rest of her - likely very long - life, she will never be able to forget what Balthazar did to her. She will never be mortal like everyone else again. Della Fearflight has killed three Elder Dragons, raised a fourth, and has resigned herself to killing two more.

But there’s - a difference, between fighting wars you didn’t make and fighting the people you grew up with. Between fighting zealots, or people whose minds are no longer their own, and fighting -- violent, outraged _children_ , who take their comfort from their Imperator’s bluster and promises of safety and a better world. Of a world where only Charr matter, and that the harms that Charr society-as-stands has done to them will not be passed onto their children. His promises that the chilling frost is both a weapon and a blessing --

* * *

She has walked in Ryland Steelcatcher’s skin. She has played voyeur in a remembrance of the Steel warband’s trip through volatile, foreign territory, filled with dead men who didn’t know they were dead yet. She knows his thoughts at a distance, trapped to play out a scene in a memory that wasn’t hers.

She remembers being young, and disillusioned, and hurting and _reeling_ from the death of her warband, and she remembers forging a deal with her Imperator: let her leave. Let her leave and join the Durmand Priory, and don’t declare her a gladium, don’t slander her. She’ll sire a litter of cubs just in case one of them happens to inherit her necromantic abilities, and then she’ll -- leave, and she’ll never look back.

(Lante Dawnsong sought her out, eventually. It wasn’t the easiest of conversations, but there are only so many times people can observe you’re facially the spitting image of the Pact Commander before you start asking the hard questions. Questions like: _what was your Legion_? And: _why does no warband claim you as their own? You’re the Pact Commander, dragonslayer, icon, you’d think it would be a point of pride --_ and questions like: _I need to know. If I’m running on falsehoods and theories, and we’re identical strangers, then I’ll go back to the Order of Whispers like a good little soldier and I won’t bother you again, Commander. But -- did you ever have children?_

Della’s so proud of her daughter, and she knows how hard that question must have been to ask.)

This is -- irrelevant, really, but her mind tends to tangent, and the things she thinks about are this: Lante Dawnsong and Ryland Steelcatcher are the same age, give or take a few years. Give or take her own age difference with Rytlock, actually, which might be funny in some other situation; if they’d been the same legion, either set of them, maybe this could be different. But instead it is what it is. The children of two influential Charr, legionnaires of their own warbands, touched by an elder dragon - it’s like looking at things through a broken mirror. She wants to understand Ryland, but she can’t do it in a way that he would understand.

What world is it, where she can understand an Elder Dragon, the _scourge of her people_ , better than she can one of her own?

Kralkatorrik was old, and he was tired, and there was -- no _joy_ to be found, in killing him. It was like putting a hound down for their own good. 

Nobody but her and Aurene will ever know. 

* * *

Bangar Ruinbringer leads the Dominion, and his most faithful champion is the age of Della’s cubs, and what is happening is -- she wants to say it’s no one’s fault. That’s the diplomatic answer. That’s the kind answer, to say _Bangar has whipped these people up into a frenzy, but we didn’t know about the rot. Nobody could have known how compelling his banner would be. We_ couldn’t _have known about the rot_. 

But she’s known about that rot for over twenty years. It’s why she _left._ There is no saving any Charr who is disillusioned enough to say _this is wrong_ , and to say _I don’t want to live like this_. Most of them become gladiums, if they’re unlucky; the rest become deserters, sworn to any cause but the one they grew up chained to. Every once in a while, you get the rare cases who stay Legion but take on a secondary allegiance, and that’s how you get most every Charr in the Pact except:

This is your Pact Commander, the leader of Dragon’s Watch, the woman who leashed a dragon: she used to be one of you, Ash Legion, and she _deserted_ , and you can never trust the words of a deserter. Who knows what she wants? Who knows how she thinks? She’s not one of you anymore.

Is it any wonder, that Bangar practically hates her on sight? Her, the antithesis of everything he stands for? Is it any wonder that he wants to slave a dragon -- because if _she_ can do it, so weakened by how far she is from being a true Charr... what can _he_ do, with armies at his back, drawing on the strength of every single member of every single legion who wants to be - more? Not slaved to this dying system, where cubs are left broken and traumatized in the fahrar by adults who think it’s _fun_ to be cruel to children? Stronger? Something else altogether?

Is it any wonder she never officially retired as the Pact Commander, because she believes she needs a title that holds weight for people to _listen_ to her?

* * *

Later on, it all feels -- disjointed, that successful, fatal push through the southern half of Drizzlewood Coast. It feels like a series of snapshots. Escort Efram to the Overlook -- break down the doors, lay siege to their buildings, lay waste to their people until the centurion makes themself known and beat them down -- set a small group of forces to protect the place and build morale for the soldiers, leave a golem or two, fling herself into the air to catch a lift from the chopper to the west -- and repeat, and push on, and push on, and push on. It’s harder every day. People desert. The rot has long set in, and it’s eating away at the heart of things.

But they manage. 

She calls commands to Kasmeer, to Logan; she takes five minutes to pore over the map with Crecia, both of them with shadows under their eyes from too little sleep, and she restrains herself (rather successfully) from leaning over the table to scream at Smodur for how _heartless_ his tactics can be. _You can’t lead through fear_ , she wants to protest, she wants to howl, _this is why your people are deserting, this is why they are afraid_ ; but it’s hard enough already for so many of these Charr to take her seriously and to remember she’s one of them. She doesn’t want to make her position more feeble by suggesting -- ha! -- tactics that sound like weak Sylvari shit to them, that in comparison to standard policy might sound like _peace and love and care_ , and there is no space for that in Charr military tactics. She was a legionnaire once. She _knows_ this she _knows_. Every time the Commander swallows down that desperate kneejerk response, Malice’s eyes slide to her; oh, Della knows she’s subtle, but she’s not subtle enough to avoid the eyes of the Imperator of her old legion. 

It’s hard, sometimes, to speak as the Pact Commander and leader of Dragon’s Watch - killer of Zhaitan and Mordremoth and Balthazar and Kralkatorrik, so much dragon blood on her hands, Champion of the Elder Dragon Aurene, so very far from mortal -- a Reaper Shroud that’s all crystalline, blinding prismatic light, the whisper of _my champion_ and infinite fondness -- it’s hard to speak only as that woman, the one who wins wars. She wants to speak as Della Fearflight, former legionnaire of the Flight warband, Magister of the Durmand Priory, baker and tailor and mother to Aurene. (They used to go for flights together, when Aurene was still young and figuring out her true power, after they’d spoken to Glint. Della would call her griffon, Aurene would take to the air and the two of them would fly, and they’d be -- alone. Not safe, but that comfortable, insulated sort of alone, where the outside world and its worries and cares no longer intrude.) Maybe that want means she’s getting old.

They fight. They win. Ranoah Grindsteel almost runs the Pact Commander over with a tank, which someone is probably going to tell their friends about later and not be believed, but at the end she’s pulled back and away. It’s no sense for the girl to die on this hill. This - specific - hill.

Gods. She feels like she’s going to be sick. It’s ridiculous, nonsensical; she’s killed so many in pursuit of her goals before, plenty of people who were still in their right minds but strictly angled against her. Why does this feel worse? 

The Commander swallows down her bile and she looks at Crecia and she says “Let’s go over it again -- we need to make sure our approach is as stable as possible,” and the beasts of flesh and bone she builds stand vigil outside the tent.

* * *

_The rot has long since set in_ , she thinks, _we have to cut the whole thing down, we can’t excise it,_ and it makes her sick to think of what has happened to these people, what is happening to these people, what will happen to these people if Ruinbringer continues unstopped -- which he’s doing, because they can’t _get_ to him, he’s too protected, it’d be a suicide mission. In her worst moments she thinks that maybe that’s the best idea -- kill off the older generation, take Ruinbringer and the Steel warband down with them, and let the younger Charr make a better world from the Citadel. One that isn’t so cruel. One that doesn’t kill and hurt and scar so much.

But that’s a stupid thought. Even if she proposed it as an authentic tactic, she’d be shot down by Malice and Crecia and Efram and Smodur before she could blink. And how credible would it make her? They’d never listen to any other strategies she’d propose.

* * *

The first time through Wolf’s Crossing is a brutal caricature of a fight. 

In the end, no matter how close it gets, the enemy doesn’t stand a chance. They never did.

* * *

It’s like pleading with a wall. “Look around!” Della cries, greatsword braced against Vishen’s rifle, necrotic energy biting at their feet -- “You’re killing your own. You don’t want this, I know you don’t!” 

Vishen Steelshot might as well laugh in her face. She fires off a shot that forces Della to step back or lose half a horn -- if the Commander loses half a horn, everyone in this battlefield is about to have bigger problems, because that’s where her anchors are for the ley-line energy and the glamour, and even now she can’t help but think about the bad politics of blowing the entire battlefield up in an uncontrolled explosion of ley-energy. For a sniper, Vishen’s surprisingly capable in close-quarters, but she’s a very _good_ sniper and Della has only got one set of eyes -- there’s a hole through her shoulder right now, caused by a single high-velocity bullet, and she doesn’t have the _time_ to use her Blood Fiend for raw materials to fill the flesh back in -- 

“The great Pact Commander.” The scorn is almost a physical thing. Their eyes meet for a second, and Steelshot’s vitriol could frighten off lesser Charr without ever having to fire a single shot. “Have we met? Don't care! Let me introduce you to my ammo.”

 _You’re killing your own_ , Della pleads, but Vishen isn’t going to _listen_. She never was. It’s always been a lost cause, because there is nothing that can be said or done by anyone who isn’t Steel. And still -- she asks, she begs, because Zhaitan-and-Mordremoth-and-Balthazar-and-Joko-and-Kralkatorrik, and everyone they engulfed in their charge -- the Pact Commander is tired of killing.

It’s amusing, probably. Maybe it’s just sad. Bangar paints her as a ruthless brutalizer, with a heartless dragon on a leash, ready to kill anyone who says no to her proposals and her ways - but there it is. She’s tired of killing. She’s tired of killing people who don’t have to die, and who are dying because someone dragged them into this fight, no matter how willingly they went. 

* * *

Ranoah Grindsteel dies. Vishen Steelshot dies. Nicabar Steelweaver dies. 

She offers them clemency, if they will lay their weapons down, and they choose to die. She _begs_ them to stand down, and they choose to die.

She’ll never know if they really thought they were going to win, and the question is going to haunt her forever. Did Ryland set his bandmates to defending Wolf’s Crossing, knowing they would die if they failed? Did he think they would win? Did he believe they would win? Even if there are more deserters every day, the Dominion isn’t infinite, and she has the advantage of being able to call on outside contacts and guilds. No matter how much that deep-seated Charr instinct recoils at the idea of bringing outsiders to fight Charr wars. But, as the Dominion and their propaganda _loves_ to remind her, Della Fearflight is a deserter and a traitor who left her warband behind to go on research trips and flights of fancy.

(Her warband was almost all dead. It was easier, to leave and pass her title to Reeva, because the alternative was to throw herself against the Legions and break herself trying. The propaganda drops _hurt_. How dare they disparage the memory of her warband? How _dare_ they?

Reeva’s at the base camp, later, after all of this. It’s been over twenty years, and she’s still alive, so apparently all that drinking and dancing did her some good -- she’s certainly weathered the years better than Della has, at least, by virtue of not having died.  
Della offers her some flatbread. They share a moment.)

Of course she can’t be trusted. She’s barely even Charr at all. Why would any of the Dominion trust her, especially knowing that no matter how much she promises that they’ll be kept safe if they surrender, Smodur might have them slaughtered the moment she turns her back?

Is it any question they choose to die?

She watches Nicabar die, or she might as well. The way his helicopter hits the ground, he’s dead on impact, no time for safety measures in the death spiral; she checks the body as they’re setting up camp at the Crossing and it’s a mess. Vishen and Ranoah are cleaner, more recognizable; she does what she can to clean their bodies, all three of them, and she sends them back to the Dominion. Steelcatcher will probably think it’s a taunt, but she hopes it hurts a little less.

Just because they chose to die doesn’t mean they didn’t think it was a worthwhile death. Just because they chose to die doesn’t mean that they didn’t die defending something they believed in.

“What would you die for,” she asks Rytlock, and it must come out more morbid than she anticipated, because he gives her a strange look. “Not the damn _Dominion_ , that’s for sure.”

It’s not worth arguing philosophy on. Her and Rytlock have butted heads at every turn for years, anyway; bringing up strange conversation topics after they’ve just killed half his son’s warband isn’t going to make it any better. 

* * *

“Show of faith: let Cinder walk out of here with me.” Ryland might be seeing reason. It’s an understandable thought. Malice and Crecia seem to be considering it, particularly Crecia, but - he is her cub, after all. She wants to think well of him. And Della is trying to think well of everyone, given that she’s been relegated to negotiator and peacebroker. “I’d need some assurances,” Crecia starts, and -  
Della knows that sound. As legionnaire Della Fearflight, she heard that sound enough that it’s never going to leave her; damn Ash Legion and their penchant for surprise kills. It’s that little moment of surprise before the body realizes it’s dead.

Everyone stops, for just a moment.

“Enough,” Smodur says, and he drops Steeltemper’s body as she chokes out her last words to the face of her legionnaire.

Cinder has barely hit the ground before Della -- _ignites_. It’s hard to describe. It’s blinding. Her Blood Fiend practically _evaporates_ , ripping itself apart into blood and gore and bone that patches itself into the wound in a spout of crimson; there is a dying woman on the ground - but she’s not dead yet. The Commander can heal, sparingly, but she doesn’t often have the right control over it -- but if she doesn’t act now, Cinder Steeltemper is about to bleed to death in the next thirty seconds, and she is so fucking _tired_ of deaths that could have been avoided. This is going to be avoided. She _will not let this happen_. The symbol she carves into the ground with a gesture is blood-and-blood-and-blood, leyline-light --

Malice and Crecia and Efram are stepping back, and she can’t quite tell what Ryland’s doing - coming for her, maybe, or Smodur, or maybe turning to call for allies - but Smodur is about to say something. It doesn’t matter what he’s going to say. There is nothing he could say that would make her forgive this.

 _Aurene, I need your power -_ it’s lighting her up from the inside before she knows it, with a gentle nudge at her mind of _remember not to go too far, Champion, they should not fear us_. (The two of them are still trying to understand what Dragon-and-Champion means to them, for them; the mutualism isn’t like anything either of them remember seeing. The Shatterer did not _suggest_ concepts to Kralkatorrik. Drakkar’s sentience and sapience -- debatable. But their souls are intertwined, lich and dragon, the two of them undying, and who can really say what that means? They haven’t told anyone but Caithe yet. They’ll tell Taimi, when they understand it a little better.) No weapon but her claws, glittering prism-things that light up with reflected light for the moment before she fills them through with her _own_ magic in chilly blues and leyline cyan and necromantic rot-greens, no need for the sword when she doesn’t want him dead even now - the unreal twitch-feeling of the wings at her back, the even-more-unreal feeling of her body being a transient thing -- the Pact Commander leaps for Smodur the Unflinching, sidestepping Ryland right before Crecia’s flame barrier goes up, and she takes him against the table and almost to the ground before he tries to stab her in the gut.

Key word: tries. The knife hits jagged against the crystalline light her form has become, and she feels it but not really. Della can only channel Aurene’s power like this, into the space where her Shroud’s energy used to sit, for so long -- but the bright-fine tips of her claws cut a chilly ruin through his armor as she exerts her weight. Iron Legion engineering can only stand up to so much, and a direct attack from a Dragon Champion - empowered by her Elder Dragon, empowered by the leyline energy she can’t help but attract, tempered by only her desire not to kill - is a powerful destructive force. “ **WE ARE NOT** **_KILLING_ ** **STEELTEMPER,”** she _howls_ , and the ground is sparking and frosting over; she knows she can’t be making a good case for being controllable, for being tameable, for not being a wild beast, but - Ryland and Crecia are exchanging words in the background and she can barely hear them, blood rushing in her ears - “ **HER DEATH WOULD BE POINTLESS, SHE DESERVES A CHANCE,** **_SHE DOES NOT HAVE TO DIE --_ ** _“_

Out of the corner of her eye, Steelcatcher turns and runs. To his allies. Out of here. Did he see -- Cinder is _breathing_ , she must be, she’ll need immediate medical help but she’s _alive_ \-- but he might not know what a Mark of Blood looks like if he’s not familiar with necromancers, and the one she just cast was barely recognizable through all the gore-and-glow -- 

Smodur stabs her again, cuts a long swathe across her barely-there throat, and it’s bleeding out the energy she needs to stay like this. Damn. _Damn._ She wants to cut a long gash through his face, she wants him to suffer for how callous that action was, but she needs to go after Ryland, no rest for the Pact Commander - “Save it,” Della spits in Smodur’s face, and with the last of the lifeforce she sends herself skidding backwards off him as the light bleeds away and she sits in her own flesh again. Crecia, no-nonsense Crecia, is already hissing directions, and -- there’s really nothing for it. 

She needs to go after Ryland. She can offer her assurances, she can tell him she’s saved Cinder’s life, but there’s no chance he’ll listen anymore. For all he cares, she let it happen, and it was planned. It may not be rational, but -- you watch your warband die and you stop caring about _rational_.

“Malice, Efram, get her stable,” Della calls over her shoulder, but she’s already pushing to her feet and skidding out the door. No time to whistle for her griffon and mount, not with Ryland almost out of sight, not with Crecia and Smodur and Rytlock hot on her trail. No rest for these old bones.

* * *

Later on, it all feels -- disjointed, that ill-fated push through the southern half of Drizzlewood Coast. It feels like a series of snapshots: chasing Steelcatcher, barely keeping in range, and losing him from sight as Varinia Stormsounder displays what she’s done. What the Dominion has done.

Killing. Fighting. Rytlock at her back, again. Crecia and Smodur are in this ring somewhere, but the sheer amount of bodies Stormsounder is throwing at them is enough to keep anyone busy. Then Stormsounder herself, who runs Della over with a car (what _is_ it with the Dominion and running her over with vehicles?) and tries - almost very successfully - to freeze her solid. If nothing else, the Flesh Golem can’t take it, and these Frost Legion corpses are so strange that she can’t raise them as minions however temporarily.

Just snapshots. Stormsounder: fighting, falling, dying. Falling under heavy fire, dashing back to the hideout as the ground blows apart only steps to the left and sends her skidding across the dirt.

And Malice, who’s had half an hour to think on her quips, offering Smodur a much less maddened retort - something that he might respect, something that doesn’t make her sound rabid: 

“You are not Khan-Ur. No one here will ever bow to you.”

_This is what the rot has done_ , Della thinks, _and we need to burn it out._

**Author's Note:**

> hi i wrote this in a fucking brainrot frenzy in the span of about six hours over two days. inspired by the fact that every time i hear the line from the summary when i'm fighting vishen i get upset
> 
> tl;dr for canon divergence: former legionnaire of the Flight warband in Ash Legion, warband was almost entirely wiped out over two and a half decades ago, made a bargain to have kids to try and pass on her necro powers so she could leave in peace. fucked off to the durmand priory, where she stayed until she became pact commander besides trahearne. got killed on a leyline during PoF _through_ reaper shroud and now she's a lich; maintains a 'living' appearance through dragon blessing & glamours anchored to horn carvings that also help bleed off the extra ley-energy. everything else is like 85-90% canon compliant with how things go ingame


End file.
